07 February 2012

"Run, forest, run!"

For the first time, scientists at Exeter University have captured on
film the process by which plants alert each other to possible dangers. When a plant is under attack it releases a gas which warns neighbouring plants to protect themselves.

The ability of plants to communicate with one another isn't new; the novelty is that this has now been "captured on film." It's doesn't seem likely that the flashes shown on the video are "real" - perhaps they are CGI representations of more subtle changes. The flashes (beginning at 1:30) are said to be evidence of "biological activity." One suggestion at the Reddit thread: "my guess is that these are transgenic plants containing a foreign gene
known as a "reporter" that produces a visual signal of some kind in
response to the gas they are interested in. This signal could be light,
but it is probably very, very dim."

And I wonder what gas the plants are releasing that serves as the messenger?

(I can't embed the video; those interested will need to view it at the link.)

And a hat tip to 127001y in the Reddit thread for suggesting the phrase I used for the title.

Not sure what you mean by 'physical gas', but it's obviously a gas. It's not a liquid or solid. Air is a gas with many ingredients. These ingredients change all the time.

When you smell a tasty soup, you are clearly smelling a gas. But what is the active ingredient that makes the good smell? You don't know.

Same as with the plants. They're going to have to analyze changes in the air surrounding wounded plants, isolate or synthesize certain volatile (gaseous) components, and see if they alone trigger changes in other plants.

Luciferases are enzymes naturally present in numerous species serving as a signal emitter to attract prey, startle predators or as a mean to find a mate. In biomedical research this interesting and useful feature of luciferase has been exploited since the 1980s, and luciferase cloned from the American firefly (Photinus pyralis) has become one of the most popular reporter genes for gene promoter studies (deWet et al.,1985). The light production is made possible by adding the substrate luciferin to the cells, and importantly the signal to noise ratio is extremely high.

In 1995, Christopher Contag and his group discovered that the light produced by the luciferase enzyme is sufficiently intense to be detected externally when placed inside a rat or a mouse using a sensitive camera. This discovery thus made possible non-invasive imaging of a variety of interesting biological problems such as the spread and treatment of bacterial infection using bacterial luciferase, tracing of cancer cells tagged with luciferase and to study gene regulation in genetically modified mice (Contag et al., 1998).

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